As new media continue to gain ground over print and analog broadcast media, advertisers are evolving their marketing and advertising to keep pace with the rise of new media and new media technologies. Consumers increasingly seek information, services, and entertainment through new media, and advertisers are finding that they have to understand this fact and adapt their advertising and marketing to new media and new media technologies or risk becoming irrelevant.
Many advertisers incorporate advertising techniques for new media in ways that are similar to print and traditional broadcast media, i.e., providing advertising space and time to sponsors in print (e.g., in newspapers) or video formats (e.g., on television shows or in movies). Unlike print and analog broadcast media, however, many new media and new media technologies allow a consumer to interact with sponsors through their advertisements by enabling connectivity between the consumer and the information presented. This creates synergies for sponsors advertising through new media technologies that were impossible with print and analog broadcast media.
One problem that advertisers face, however, is how to ensure consumers are actually cognitively conscious of the sponsor's advertisements when using new media. For example, a consumer watching a television show on new media technology such as hulu.com might mute the sound on the advertisement or perform other tasks instead of paying attention to the advertisement. This creates a problem for advertisers and new media companies alike as the sponsors that pay for the advertising that partly or wholly funds new media companies may suspect that they are getting little in return for their advertising money, thus reducing investment or revenues in new media advertising. This problem is not limited to just new media, as print and traditional broadcast media also face the problem of ensuring cognitive consumer awareness of their advertisements.
Furthermore, this problem is compounded by the recent rise of free services in exchange for sponsor's advertising. Some of these services allow a consumer to connect to the internet at no cost in exchange for listening to a sponsor's advertisements. These free services, however, suffer the same problem as the new media and traditional broadcast media of ensuring a consumer's cognitive awareness during the sponsor's advertisement that provides the free service.
It would therefore be desirable to have a verification process that ensures a consumer is cognitively aware of an advertisement.